Users who haven't upgraded their Macs to Snow Leopard, let alone OS X Lion, may be in luck: Apple is reportedly offering a free copy of Snow Leopard to push users toward iCloud.

Macgasm reports that some MobileMe customers are receiving email offers to receive a free DVD of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. After they upgrade, the report says, those users are then asked to purchase OS X 10.7.3 Lion and sign up for iCloud.

Users are asked to log in to Mobile.Me at this link, then fill in their address information. Users should then receive an email saying, "Snow Leopard is on the way," Macgasm commenters reported.

Snow Leopard currently costs $29, so slowpokes who take advantage of the deal will save a bit of money. However, the upgrade to OS X Lion will cost $29.99, so users will still owe Apple a dollar. Apple provides iCloud customers with up to 5GB of storage for free; additional storage costs $20 per year for 10GB, $40 per year for 20GB, and $100 per year for 50GB.

It isn't quite clear what those who own a MacBook Air, which lacks an optical drive, are supposed to do.

iCloud syncs Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote productivity software, plus Contacts, Calendar and Mail. Photo Stream also backs up the last 1,000 photos you took to the cloud.

Unfortunately for Apple and iCloud, iCloud's Mail and Notes suffered outages for "less than 1 percent of users" this week, Apple acknowledged on a support page. Apple's iCloud status page said that users may have had problems accessing iCloud mail on both Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, some users who posted to Apple's support forum said that the problem was fixed. Others, however, said that they had received mail for about an hour, and then the service had failed again.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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